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uffered from Crohn39。s disease, a deep inflammation of the colon, leaving her little or no control of her bowels. She has been plagued and humiliated by accidents in public. People have responded to this affliction by yelling at her, calling her filthy. She has silently accepted the appellation, taken it within her. Filthy bitch! she yells at herself. Go away! 15. I lie awake, my throat tight and aching as I remember the years when her illness was more active, filled with agonizing hallucinations that most of us, during a lifetime, experience for only seconds in our worst, most searing nightmares.16. She had been a normal, beautiful child. The changes began in high school. Kathy started a diary when she was 16 years old. She wrote: This morning I feel as though someone took a file and sandpaper and scratched off all my epidermis. I feel raw and sore and ugly and dirty and loathsome. I also have a headache and coffee makes it worse. I escape thru dreams and the pressure of returning reality gives me a headache.17. Something inside me is going thru this funny, alien state, a sense of being at the mercy of some strange force, and this pathetic scarecrow figure inside me at the mercy of other forces. My stomach is empty and gnawing and uneasy as if anything could fall in and break the superstructure I hold up with all my force.18. Kathy did go off to college. The trauma of her breakdown there was followed by the deadening travail of the long search for a psychiatric solution. Then, a decade of daily life in the huge psychiatric hospital, the crazy house as she always called it. In those years, she has never been able to draw a deep breath full of good life.19. The daughter I would have had — were it not for this evil illness — exists in embryo in the daughter I do have. After an outburst, she will e and tell me quietly: I am sorry, mother. I don39。t want to fight with you.20. Thank you, she will say: for giving me a good day.21. To admit the truth, sometimes I trigger her outburst. Like Tuesday, whe